13 - Sade and the Novel

Summary

Sade was a reader, writer and critic deeply immersed in the prose fiction of his time. His own oeuvre brings together diverse traditions of storytelling ranging from anecdotes, whore dialogues and libertine novels to philosophical contes, sentimental fiction and the Gothic novel. While works such as Thérèse philosophe offered him a model for the 120 Days of Sodom and the Histoire de Juliette, Richardson’s Clarissa provided him with a template of virtue in distress which he would repeatedly exploit in novels ranging from Justine to his later historical fiction such as La Marquise de Gange. This chapter explores some of the key tropes Sade borrows from these antecedents, and the ways in which he recycles these tropes – often to very different ends – within a diverse novelistic corpus still viewed too narrowly by critics and publishers alike.